Where Are the Anti-Communist Movies?

The new movie The Wind That Shakes the Barley, about
the Irish struggle for independence in the early 1920s, has
beautiful Irish cinematography and effectively shows us the poverty
of Ireland, the commitment of the rebels, the conflicts inevitable
in any political movement, and the brutality of the British
occupiers. Critics complain it goes overboard on that last point.
Michael Gove protested in the Times of London that it
portrays the British Black and Tans as “sub-human mercenaries
burning thatched cottages, torturing by using pliers to rip out
toenails [actually fingernails] and committing extreme violence
against women.” It’s not the first movie to be criticized for
making the British out to be more brutal than they actually were.
Mel Gibson’s The Patriot depicted the British army herding
all the residents of a town into a church and then setting it on
fire. Never happened, historians say.

But hey, the British Empire committed plenty of crimes over the
centuries, so I’m not so upset that the Australian right-winger Mel
Gibson and the English left-winger Ken Loach may have overreached
on the details. What I’m wondering about is, Where are the films
depicting Communist atrocities?

Anti-Nazi movies keep coming out, from Confessions of a Nazi
Spy and Hitler, Beast of Berlin in 1939 and on
through The Great Dictator, The Mortal Storm,
The Diary of Anne Frank, Sophie’s Choice,
Schindler’s List, right up to the current Black
Book. And many of these have included searing depictions of
Nazi brutality, both physical and psychological.

But where are the anti-communist movies? Oh, sure, there have
been some, from early Cold War propaganda films to such artistic
achievements as The Red Danube, Ninotchka,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The Killing
Fields, East-West, and Before Night Falls.
But considering that National Socialism lasted only 12 years in one
country (and those it occupied), and Communism spanned half the
globe for 75 years, you’d think there’d be lots more stories to
tell about Communist rule.

No atrocities, maybe? Nazis and Brits were vicious, but
Communists were just intellectually misguided? Well, that seems
implausible. They murdered several times as many people. If
screenwriters don’t know the stories, they could start with the
Black Book of Communism. It could introduce them to such
episodes as Stalin’s terror-famine in Ukraine, the Gulag, the
deportation of the Kulaks, the Katyn Forest massacre, Mao’s
Cultural Revolution, the Hungarian revolution, Che Guevara’s
executions in Havana, the flight of the boat people from Vietnam,
Pol Pot’s mass slaughter-material enough for dozens of movies.

Lloyd Billingsley wrote about the great stories, the great
villains, and the great books that might inspire movies about
Communism:

“Though of global dimension, the conflict encompasses millions
of dramatic personal stories played out on a grand tapestry of
history: courageous Solidarity unionists against a Communist
military junta; teenagers facing down tanks in the streets of
Budapest and Prague; Cuban gays oppressed by a macho-Marxist
dictatorship; writers and artists resisting the kitsch of
obscurantist materialism; families fleeing brutal persecution,
risking their lives to find freedom.

“Furthermore, great villains make for great drama, and
communism’s central casting department is crowded: Lenin, Stalin,
Mao, Hönecker, Ceaucescu, Pol Pot, Col. Mengistu—all of cosmic
megalomania—along with their squads of hacks, sycophants, and
stooges, foreign and domestic.

“A few English-language films have drawn on this remarkable
material, especially book-into-film projects based on highly
publicized works, among them One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich (a 1971 British-Norwegian production) and, of
course, Doctor Zhivago (1965). But many other natural
book-to-film projects remain untouched, from the story of Stalin’s
daughter Svetlana (who left Russia for the West) to works by such
high-ranking defectors as Polish Ambassador Romuald Spasowski
(The Liberation of One), KGB agent Arkady Schevchenko
(Breaking With Moscow), and persecuted Cuban poets Armando
Valladares (Against All Hope) and Heberto Padilla
(Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden). In light of the most
recent revelations concerning the espionage of Alger Hiss,
Whittaker Chambers’ Witness is another obvious
candidate.”

Some might say that the Soviet Union is no more, this is ancient
history, and we should let bygones be bygones. But Ken Loach’s new
movie depicts events of the 1920s, and the Nazi regime fell in
1945. The Soviet Union continued until 1991, and communism
continues in Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Besides, as the great
historian Lord Acton knew, the historian must be a moral judge. The
muse of the historian, he thought (in the words of his colleague
John Neville Figgis), is not Clio, but Rhadamanthus, the avenger of
innocent blood. The victims of communism, and its heroic resisters,
deserve to have their stories remembered.